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The Russian Revelation

Back in the USSR? Don't know how lucky you are, boy!

As part of the celebrations of 50 years of Peace and Friendship between Plymouth in the UK and Novorossiysk in Russia, the Plymouth Maids clog dancing team, of which my wife is a member, were invited to put on a few performances in the home of the Russian Navy. In my naivety, I had assumed, right up to quite close to the date of our departure, that we were off for a fairly grim, but hopefully interesting, week in the frozen north. Instead, we emerged into the warmth, both physically and socially, of the sun-drenched Black Sea coast.

Being neither a 'maid' nor a musician, I was allocated the role of bag and flag carrier, which left me a few windows of opportunity to carry out a bit of surreptitious dowsing in this relatively unknown corner of the world.

I was rather unsure how the authorities would react to a rod-waving Brit, given the feeling that the street-dancing and apparently unpredictable Plymouth Maids were clearly regarded as inherently subversive. However, my first chance came when the entourage were taken on yet another shopping opportunity - and a number of us temporarily jumped ship to investigate a nearby church. This involved negotiating a building site and crossing a great expanse of waste ground, soon to be converted into a magnificent new public park.

We were rewarded with a chance to look around the tourist-free St Uspensky's Cathedral in quiet contemplation. In Soviet times, many churches were bulldozed to make way for new roads or blocks of flats. Those that remained were officially frowned upon and fell into disrepair. It was therefore something of a surprise to find that those that had survived were sporting gleaming golden domes and smart new green or blue tiled roofs - recently refurbished, in St Uspensky's case, by the 'Black
Sea Hellenic Foundation'.

If St Uspensky's is typical of Russian Orthodox churches, it is an interesting comparison to the sacred sites of Western Europe. With its circular dome and squat cruciform shape, it dowses more like a stone circle than an English parish church. Energy radials pour in and out of a central point immediately below the dome, and they seemed to increase in number as I walked round. The only similar site I can recall in the UK is the enigmatic little church at Trewen - as Cornish as clotted cream and with no Eastern European connection that I can possibly imagine.

Given that even the new regime prefers a no-photos and headscarves-for-women approach, I was discrete with my dowsing and did most of it outside. In common with its western equivalent, there was a water line heading for the shielded altar, but surprisingly for such an elevated site no ley lines were evident. However, a few metres to the south east stands a matching, but separate, bell tower and chapel. This has just a couple of plain energy lines, but a strong wide ley, neatly encompassing the building - and taking in a smart new block of flats, and crossing the forthcoming park lake on its way.

Visitors from the UK are very rare in this part of the continent, so our guides and minders seemed a bit unsure of what we would or should do during our stay. Ad hoc dancing, let alone dowsing, appeared not to be on the agenda - so we were taken to a waterfall in the woods, whose waters were alleged to have the power of eternal youth. This turned out to be a heavily canalised stream with a few concrete flower beds. We took some statutory photos, but soon tired of it. Quite by chance, and whilst looking for the gents (which I never found), behind a market stall I noticed a small round chapel. Clearly reconstructed in the age of post-perestroika, it too had a swirl of alternating radials - and a bit of the tamed stream passing in front of it in a concrete gulley. This was evidently the origin of the life-promoting legend - a 'sacred' energy site, which naturally purifies the water, holy well style - now safely sanitised into a theme-park waterfall with a few trippers bars and crudely disguised by a folk myth about elixir. A real gem, if you can find it.

Perhaps I should not have been too surprised that Russia plays understated host to such a positive dowsing environment. As long ago as 1970, as a would-be hippie student, I bought a copy of 'PSI - Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain' (Abacus Books 1970 - but probably long out of print), which examined the then ground-breaking work on telepathy and Kirlian photography being undertaken in the USSR. These are studies that have since become part of the mainstream bedrock of the alternative movement. Whilst such topics have been left to marginal figures such as Rupert Sheldrake and Lynn McTaggert in the west, in Russia they have long been considered matters of serious scientific interest. Alongside of this, the esoteric tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church was just about the only pre-soviet philosophical strand of the old regime to withstand 74 years of materialist governance. In the years since Gorbachev, a rising tide of active Orthodoxy has swept across the east like an intangible tsunami. Science and spiritualism have found a fertile common ground in the new Russian Federation.

I had not expected to enjoy Moscow. Sure, it would be interesting to see the Kremlin, at least through a coach window, but I had never had a burning desire to go there. However, as with all peoples and places, it pays to take 'em as you find 'em. The visit started worryingly, with a dire warning from our guide about a plethora of knife- wielding miscreants trying to steal our passports - so much so, that a number of our group opted not to undertake the evening visit to the Opera as planned, which was a real shame for them.

Moscow by night was a fantastic fairyland of lights and buildings, with hordes of people strolling about arm in arm, enjoying the unseasonably balmy evening air. At the Opera itself, the dancing Brits soon attracted the attention of the KGB for eating chocolate in the auditorium, despite the sign to the contrary (in Russian)!

From a dowsing perspective, the Russian adventure ended on a quite remarkable high. As part of our City Tour, we were taken to the seriously impressive Church of Christ the Saviour which, we were told, incorporated four other churches. Having deduced that folk-dancing without permission was enough to get you Gulagged, I felt dowsing in central Moscow presented an ideal 'opportunity' to practise my under-developed skills in deviceless mode.

However, this is a site where rods are, quite frankly, redundant. Walking across the outsized interior of the church in one direction was like being drawn down onto one's knees by a well-meaning, but extremely heavy, weight. Walking across at right angles to this line was more like mounting the camber of a road designed for particularly heavy rainfall. I have experienced these phenomena to some extent in cathedrals in Athens and Rennes, but never on this scale. But then, the Russians don't do - and never have done - anything by halves. Directly under the centre, under each of the four main domes of the massive structure is a star, inlaid in mosaic. Standing on any of these - as many non-dowsers did intuitively - is a calming, yet rejuvenating, experience despite the gigantic auditorium thronged with tourists and worshippers. What a revelation!

Our last stop, en route to the airport, was in Red Square itself. I really thought this would be a miserable place - all militaristic overtones and severely dulled energy, but once again I couldn't have been more wrong. Even though we were standing on the spot where the greatest demonstration of nuclear might outside the US was routinely paraded - to warn the rest of us what would happen to us if we were daft enough to go folk-dancing in the park - and on another day, not too long ago, we could have waved to Khrushchev or Stalin, saluting grimly in their furry hats from atop the red bunker of Lenin's tomb, here was a place of light energy and fresh air, overlooked by the astonishing picture-book façade of St Basil's Cathedral.

Although we didn't get the chance to go into St Basil's itself, I felt sure the spirals we had found earlier would be repeated here too. Could it be that the outrageously spiralled domes are distant echoes of the revered natural spirals of earth energy forms below them? Could it further be the case that the unfeasibly vibrant colours of the domes are also the 'colours' of the energy lines they mark? In a country where, even today, rumour becomes fact very quickly, I will leave it for another person or another visit to confirm or refute these suggestions and I would very much welcome any information from Russian-based dowsers in this context.

Many thanks indeed to the many Russians who helped us - and tolerated our eccentricities - during the period of our visit.

My personal thanks to the Plymouth Maids for allowing me a unique opportunity to dowse in such a fascinating and misunderstood country.

Nigel Twinn Tamar Dowsers, September 2006